The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère
"The Kingdom" is a weird, brilliant hybrid of biblical interpretation, memoir, and historical fiction in which the author speculates about the personalities of the earliest Christians. The book is brash in its structure, tone, and some of its claims. But Carrère isn’t doing anything that Christians haven't been doing for two millennia. He’s just doing it an in a wildly contemporary, self-conscious way.
You know the story. A young Jewish man preaching in Galilee and Judea accrues a small group of followers. He annoys the Jewish establishment and the Roman occupiers enough to be executed by crucifixion. It is a demeaning and, for the time at least, unremarkable end, but soon afterward, his acolytes claim that his body has vanished from its resting place, and that he has appeared to them in visions. This, they say, affirms his identity as the Son of God.
For a while after this, the disciples and hangers-on of Jesus Christ—who believe that the world as they know it will end in a few months or